Why do psychologists use deception in social research?
Question:
Testing
Answers:
There are several reasons:
Hawthrone effect: Subjects will improve their behavior or productivity, just because they are being observed (or behave in a way they think they are supposed to.just because they are being observed)
Subject-expectancy effect: A subject expects a given result and therefore unconsciously manipulates an experiment or reports the expected result. So, if they were told that they study was assessing their social interactions under high stress and they feel that social interactions under high stress are supposed to be negative (or the experimenter wants social interactions to be negative), they may unconsciously respond in a negative fashion.
The problem with human subjects is that they try to be too helpful. So, they will respond according to how they feel they should be responding (the response the experimenter supposedly wants) and increase the chances of Type I errors (a false positive).
Basically, they want to get a naturalistic observation and you can't achieve that in an experiment. Deception helps experimenters get a little closer to a naturalistic observation.
For example, look at the Milgram experiment, a study of obedience and compliance. They basically were told that they were going to be shocking someone and they had to obey the experimenter, however, no one was actually being shocked. Still, the subjects continued to "shock" people, despite screams of pain. If the subjects were told, "Okay, I'm going to ask you to shock someone, but it won't actually hurt because he's not really being shocked", the subjects probably wouldn't have complied to the same horrifying degree.
Other Answers:
I think I know what you are talking about they are not trying to be your friend all they care about is finding out what the heck is wrong with you to help you get better
I guess one possible answer to this would be to see the effect it would have on the social development of the participants.
You would need to ask a social psychologist in order to find out for sure.
Because they are trying to get to the real truth so that they can help you. some people don't usually like to tell the in tire truth so they basically reverse psychology on that person.
to find out if you are lying
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